The Kumarbi Cycle, and Its Startling Likeness to Hesiod

Kumarbi is the deposed former king of the gods in the Hurrian mythology the Hittites took over, and the myths named for him, the Kumarbi cycle, contain one of the most discussed parallels in the study of ancient religion. In the Song of Kumarbi he overthrows the sky-god Anu by biting off and swallowing his genitals, and is thereby made pregnant with the storm-god Teshub and other deities who are born from him and displace him in turn; in the later Song of Ullikummi he raises a monstrous stone giant to unseat the storm-god. This sequence, a violent succession of divine generations, a castration, a swallowing, and a young storm-god who wins the kingship of heaven, corresponds so closely to the succession of Ouranos, Kronos and Zeus in Hesiod's Theogony that most scholars accept some line of transmission from the Near East to early Greece. Kumarbi thus stands at a crucial junction in the history of myth: the elder god who will not stop plotting to regain heaven, and a probable ancestor of a central Greek story.